Shame wrestled with insecurity inside her. “I understand what you’re saying, sir. And I appreciate it. But what if I still can’t measure up without Dax? Let’s face it, solving my problem is going to be a little harder than handing me some gadget I no longer know how to use and kidding everyone that I’m still able to pull my own weight around here. That might work for Julian at the moment, but—”
Vaughn stepped down hard on her words. “Julian needs to keep occupied for the sake of his ownmorale. Youneed to keep occupied for the sake of everybody else’s.”
She shook her head in confusion. “I’m not following you.”
“We’re talking about esprit de corps, Lieutenant. Morale. Specifically, that of Nog, Shar, Tenmei, T’rb, Cassini, Permenter, Hunter, Candlewood, Leishman, VanBuskirk, and whoever the hell else it’ll take to finally get us inside that artifact. If you drop out of sight because of your own perceived shortcomings, how do you think that will affect theirwork?”
Ezri’s mouth fell open. She hadn’t considered that. And the fact that she hadn’t considered that seemed to her a good argument in favor of removing her name from the active duty roster.
But she also understood that he was right.
“So you’re staying put, Lieutenant,” he continued, his gaze and voice hardening back into tempered steel. “That’s a direct order. You arestill capable of following orders, aren’t you?”
Her despair began to abate as she came to a realization: Her ability to follow orders was perhaps the only thing about herself in which she still had any real confidence.
She offered him a small wry smile, sensing that Vaughn’s gift for saying precisely the right thing at exactly the right time rivaled even that of Benjamin Sisko. Perhaps such bluntly honest and uncompromising counseling skills were one of the chief prerequisites for a career in command.
“Request permission to return to my post, Captain. I need to get ready for the blockade briefing.”
Though Vaughn’s craggy face remained hard, Ezri saw the warmth in his piercing blue eyes. At the same time, she felt tears of gratitude beginning to well up in her own.
“Permission granted, Lieutenant,” he said. “Dismissed.”
Barely an hour after he had left the medical bay with the essence of his novel blockade-busting plan percolating in his thoughts, Nog began to feel confident that his scheme might actually work. He only hoped that Commander Vaughn would have as much faith in the idea as he did.
He also found that concentrating on that hope helped him avoid dwelling on the consequences of success—consequences of which he was reminded every time he put his weight squarely on his regenerated left leg.
Regardless, when Vaughn scheduled a technical briefing for the senior staff at 0800 the next morning, Nog felt that he was ready, his fears and misgivings notwithstanding.
Nog strode into the mess hall, where Vaughn, Ezri, and Shar were arranging themselves around the room’s largest table. Also present was Dr. Bashir, who sat with his hands folded in his lap, conspicuously silent amid the low conversational murmur that filled the room. Though he was shaved and his hair was combed, he still had a hollow, haunted look about him that made Nog shiver inwardly. The doctor glanced occasionally toward Ezri, who was seated at his right, and at Sacagawea, who occupied a specially constructed chair on his left. The towering, slender alien seemed intensely curious, swiveling its great head in every direction as though taking great care to miss nothing. As he took a seat almost directly across the table from Sacagawea, Nog wondered how much of the proceedings the alien would understand—and exactly what Commander Vaughn believed their D’Naali guide could contribute to the briefing.
Seated near Tenmei, Shar, and science specialist T’rb, Bowers stared with obvious unease across the table at Sacagawea. Turning toward the head of the table, he addressed Vaughn. “Captain, are you sure it’s appropriate for Sacagawea to attend this meeting?”
A look of sadness crossed Vaughn’s features, then vanished behind the façade of command. “I do, Lieutenant. Our guest requires Dr. Bashir’s constant attention.” Vaughn looked significantly in Bowers’s direction, and the tactical officer immediately seemed to grasp his meaning.
It’s really the other way around,Nog realized a moment later. Having the alien nearby must be keeping the doctor calm.Trying not to stare, he watched as Bashir placed a hand on the table. It was impossible not to notice the hand’s slight tremor. Or Ezri, as she placed her hand atop the doctor’s while offering him chatty reassurances that soon, very soon,everything would be all right. He wondered if she was trying to be strong for them both, or if she was leaning on the doctor for support.
Once again, Nog felt a sensation of intense guilt welling up inside him. Two of his closest friends had been torn to pieces, maimed by the alien artifact. Perhaps forever. I, on the other hand, get restored to perfect condition. At least until we get Sacagawea’s “worldlines” untangled.
“I said we’re ready whenever you are, Lieutenant,” Vaughn was saying, his impatient tone bringing Nog out of his reverie like a sudden Ferenginar cloudburst.
Nog felt like a cadet who’d turned up for inspection late and out of uniform. It took him a moment to gather his thoughts. “Yes, sir. I wanted to start by saying that Ensign ch’Thane has double-checked my figures, as have specialists T’rb, Hunter, and other members of the science and engineering teams involved.” Nog was gratified to see that Shar and T’rb were both nodding. A wide smile bisected T’rb’s cyan-hued Bolian features.
“And I’ll give it an official thumbs-up from a tactical perspective,” Bowers said. “At least, that’s how it looks on the padd.”
“Sounds chancy to me,” Tenmei said, laying aside a padd that displayed some of Nog’s numbers. “What you’re essentially proposing is that we use a series of large Oort cloud bodies as relays for the Defiant’s transporter.”
“Actually,” Nog said, “those frozen rocks will act as platforms for a series of self-replicating transporter relays, which we’ll send out ahead of our away team. We’ll beam the first one out to the nearest cometary body, and it will beam another relay out to the next body, and so on.”
“It sounds too easy,” Tenmei said. “There’s got to be a huge power cost associated with doing something like this.”
Shar nodded. “You’re correct. The drain on the Defiant’s replicator systems will be enormous. Setting up the transporter relay system will burn out the central replicator waveguides.”
“Meaning we’ll be without replicator technology for the rest of the voyage,” Nog said.
Vaughn appeared to take the news in stride. “It’s a small price to pay if it means restoring our friends. Besides, the cargo bays are adequately stocked with field rations and spare parts. If the plan works, I’m sure that we’re all prepared to ‘rough it’ until we’re back home.” He looked around the room, apparently looking for objections. There were none.
“The whole idea reminds me,” Bowers said, “of the self-replicating mines Starfleet set up outside the wormhole during the war to discourage the Dominion from bringing reinforcements into the Alpha Quadrant.”
Nog swelled with familial pride. Those mines had been conceived by his father, Rom, the year before he became the grand nagus of the Ferengi Alliance.
“That’s partly where I got the idea,” Nog said. “It’s also a natural extension of something I was already researching when we took the Saganinto the Oort cloud in the first place. Originally, I thought that the crystal lattice structures of the cloud’s comet fragments might be used as natural high-bandwidth enhancers for extending the range of our sensor beams. But when we almost collided with the alien artifact, we discovered that those crystalline bodies have another interesting property: Their subspace resonance patterns function like natural cloaking devices. Which is why we were almost right on top of the artifact before we even saw it.”